To the outside observer, mainstream romance novels are a kind of softcore porn consumed by an extremely dedicated, mostly female audience. My mom read them in the layaway line at Walmart, and yours probably did, too.

But for Patty Gone, a multimedia artist and poet living in New York City, the books are something else entirely. They're a massive cultural force. Given how well they sell, they basically underwrite the entire production of more "serious" contemporary literature.

Romance novels also offer their readers an escape from the doldrums of daily life. And in Gone's case, they provided a pathway to connect with Gone's true gender identity, as well as a way to communicate with their aging grandmother.

I'm a few days late to this but John Oliver, the host of Last Week Tonight, took on a subject near and dear to my personal heart on his show Sunday evening: public shaming. (Scroll to the end of this post to see the video.)

Public shaming is an old form of punishment—The Scarlet Letter was about public humiliation, and in early American colonies, people were regularly punished for transgressions by being put in stocks in the town square—but, as you probably know, it's gone digital. Thanks to social media, anyone who makes a mistake, misstep, or who genuinely fucks up can (and often will) be inundated with waves of criticism every time they look at their phones. Sometimes it's even deserved.

Stranger Things To Do is on a constant mission to make your life as full of as many fun events as possible, at as little cost as possible. Beyond just our lists of cheap & easy things to do, we're now offering exclusive deals on some of this weekend's hottest music and arts events—just for you!

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Man fatally shot at Cal Anderson Park: Where just under a week ago, hundreds of students gathered to demand action on climate change, a man in his early 20s was shot dead last night. At around 9:40 p.m., when the park was still busy with soccer players and dog walkers, a man was shot in the back of the head near the illuminated basketball courts. This follows a suicidal man being shot by police the night before on Capitol Hill after pointing his gun at officers. While gun violence does happen year-round, data shows that these incidents increase when the weather turns warm.

Researchers at UW and Microsoft are building the first-ever DNA computer: Scientists have long wondered whether DNA, the natural code that governs life, could replace our binary computing system to store and retrieve data. But UW and Microsoft are leagues ahead of anyone else actually trying to do it. They’ve gotten the information to flow pretty well in one direction—translating binary to strands of DNA—but reading it back can be a bit more labor intensive and costly. They’re building a new automated DNA computer that will both encode and decode data into DNA automatically without the use of human intervention. As a proof of concept, they encoded the word “hello” and then read it back. That may sound simple, but I’d like to see your DNA-based computer.

The FBI gets in on the Boeing investigation: The U.S. Department of Transportation will now be joined by the Federal Bureau of Investigation on the criminal investigation into the certification of the Boeing 737 MAX, the plane that has crashed twice in the past six months. The investigation is being overseen by the U.S. Department of Justice. The FBI has a wealth of resources. At the time being, the FBI is keeping its involvement in the investigation very hush hush. Canada and the EU doesn't trust the FAA and will conduct their own investigations before deciding whether the 737 MAX is safe.

Washington teens love to vape: Vaping! It's up there with Fortnite and Tik Tok with today's youth. My 14-year-old brother will kill me for typing that sentence. According to this report by the Washington Department of Health and Health Care Authority, "use of vape products in the past 30 days among 10th graders increased from 13 percent in 2016 to 21 percent in 2018." Hey, but cigarette smoking is down!

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Malian singer-songwriter Fatoumata Diawara’s voice is absolutely captivating. It skips like a rock over water across different registers. It's comforting, familiar, textured—it has a Sade quality to it. The singer, who plays at Neptune tomorrow night, sings not from her belly, but from somewhere higher up in her body. Diawara combines the sounds and traditions from Wassalou music of southern Mali with Western ones. She plays an electric guitar. It's sick as fuck.

We are the billionaire buildings of NYC's Hudson Yards...Charles Mudede

On March 8, Seattle Times's astute real estate reporter Mike Rosenberg wrote that the waterfront area has become the next "gold rush." Big-money investors are moving in and expecting a terrific boom in property values. And so, what we have is something that, despite its origins in public feeling, has the potential of becoming its complete opposite: a site of exclusion. This development would be a dub (echoes) of what's happening right now in the area around New York City's High Line, a Manhattan project that was inspired by public spirit (Friends of the High Line), but upon its completion of its first phase in 2009, was almost immediately captured by a market that has as its logic the rapid and otherworldly inflation of asset values. The similarities between the fate of the High Line and the future of Seattle's Waterfront Project are striking. Rosenberg writes that "even before the Alaskan Way Viaduct finally comes down, the gold rush to cash in on soaring property values in the area is in full swing."

This week is the week for Seattle to think about the Waterfront project—which has already buried billions of dollars—because the first phase of a massive development located at the north end of the High Line, the Hudson Yards, just opened and has stunned the public and critics not with its unrestrained expression of corporate power, but its obvious obscenity. Here we have, without a doubt, a form of city planning that must be described as billionaire urbanism. It's the terminal point of neoliberal urbanism. It's soon coming to Seattle's waterfront.
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The first thing you’ll see when you walk into Vine Street Market in Belltown is a wall of beer. Turn to the left? Wall of beer. To the right? Another wall of beer. In fact, beer covers so many surfaces in this Fifth Avenue market that you get the sense the owners would put beer in front of the door if that didn’t prevent customers from getting in.

I don't get excited about vast quantities of beer. Menus with 100 beers on tap are boring. But there's something different about Vine Street's beer selection—it's both vast and meticulously curated.

This market is only 500 square feet yet manages to carry a collection of nearly 500 different types of beer that rivals the city’s other premier bottle shops like Chuck’s Hop Shop in the Central District or Bottleworks in Wallingford or Full Throttle Bottles in Georgetown. Vine Street is a fraction of those stores' size yet still carries the names that make people with good taste in beer raise their eyebrows, names like Holy Mountain, E9, Mirage, Matchless, Skookum, Urban Family, and many, many, many, more.

Where has June Chikuma's music been my whole life, asked the guy who's never played video games.Freedom to Spend

June Chikuma, "Oddman Hypothesis" (Freedom to Spend)

Japanese composer June Chikuma designed music for Nintendo’s Bomberman franchise circa 1983, among many other video games that formed the chiptune aesthetic that's proved to be surprisingly durable into this century. She's also composed for film and television over the last few decades. The golden-eared, underground-culture savants at RVNG Intl. and its Freedom to Spend subsidiary (Matt Werth, Eternal Tapestry's Jed Bindeman, and ex-Yellow Swans member Pete Swanson) have done the world a favor by collecting June's recordings off the ultra-obscure 1986 LP Divertimento and other stray cuts from the period for Les Archives (released on LP with bonus 7-inch on April 5).

Les Archives contains music of extremely advanced rhythmic sensibilities—a sort of proto-IDM/drum & bass intricacy that's astounding for '80s productions. The balance between playfulness and braininess is impressive throughout. June imbues these tracks with a distinctive ominousness that overwhelms the video-game context—although I'm just theorizing, as I've never played video games (true story).

Once, a friend told me: "Jasmyne, there are two types of people in this world: ones that think the first day of spring is on the 20th of March, and those that think it is on the 21st." As if it really mattered. But, of course, today is the first day of spring. The 20th day in March. The season that does with cherry trees what Chilean poet Pablo Neruda wants to do with me: fuck me. Just kidding—though if you're looking for the season to really get down and dirty with you, might I suggest you hang out in the quad over at UW? I'm standing by this Neruda joke.
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I am a girl who sabotaged my relationship. I was angry; I had complaints. But my real issue was a store of repressed childhood trauma, and I was working it out on the closest person to me, my BF. We had something magical, and I destroyed it. I am now willing to give 110 percent to fix it.

We no longer have sex. We are hardly on speaking terms. I know now that my relationship skills are stunted—more childhood baggage—but I want to save my relationship. Do you have any tips on initiating sex with someone whom I have traumatized or on improving communication with someone who is so resentful? I am willing to give it time and effort, accept my faults, and breathe deeply rather than react in anger when we talk through things.

March 21 & April 18Nocturnal Emissions Series Local sex-positive horror maven Isabella Price hosts this series on third Thursdays of classic slashers and supernatural chillers, with a burlesque performance and other fun before every screening. The remaining films are Wes Craven's cannibal satire The People Under the Stairs and the woman-directed Slumber Party Massacre II.(Northwest Film Forum)

Bellevue Arts Museum—which has no permanent collection and grew out of Bellevue's summer arts and crafts fair—is quickly becoming a hub for amazing, weird, really cool exhibitions by mostly local artists.

It's an unlikely turn of events. In 2001, BAM moved into its current building, designed by Steven Holl. In 2003, facing a lack of attendance and running out of money, the museum closed for 18 months. There was also a brief shutdown scare in 2016 after losing donors and key staff.

But in September of 2017, BAM hired executive director and chief curator Benedict Heywood. His background as founder of an alternative arts space in Minneapolis called The Soap Factory and his two-year stint as director of Paul Allen's short-lived art gallery Pivot Art + Culture make the British curator uniquely qualified for his role.

After that, Chase Burns talks about the Andrew Yang phenomenon. Yang is running for president as a Democrat, wants to give every American a thousand bucks a month, and has enough support that he’ll be in the first Democratic presidential debate.

NYC quartet Sunwatchers stand as one of America’s greatest bands of the 2010s. Their self-titled 2016 album on John Dwyer’s Castle Face label is a torrid blast of horn-powered rock shot through with the sinuous melodies of Ethiopian jazz and spiritual ache of Saharan desert psychedelic blues. Concerns about white Westerner appropriation fly out the window once you hear how Sunwatchers alchemize these elements into transcendental jams. Their guitar tunings are unusual and their timbres scalding, not unlike those of the fantastic Horse Lords and Cave. Sunwatchers’ new album, Illegal Moves, ups the ante even more, generating ecstatic mantric riffs that spiral skyward with a relentlessness that sounds and feels revolutionary. All this, plus a rapturous cover of Alice Coltrane’s “Ptah, the El Daoud.”

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Theater

March 14–April 7John A young couple trying to reknit after a cheating incident is haunted by ghosts at their bed and breakfast getaway—and the owner of the house has memories of her own. Annie Baker's play was listed as one of the 10 Best Shows of 2015 by Time and received critical praise all around. (ArtsWest, $20—$42)